Classical Net - Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, A Guide 5. Third episode (8:46) – the major climax of the work occurs here 6. Transition - or fourth episode – (12:15), leading to 7. Restatement of all themes (13:05) 8. Coda (14:50 to the end) In other words, the overall form corresponds roughly to the Elizabethan fantasia for viols, the music the composer seeks to evoke. But the composer doesn't indulge in antiquarianism. He writes a thoroughly modern work. You wouldn't find, for example, section 6 or the elaborate transitions throughout the work (not to mention the extreme tempo and dynamic changes) in the older music. The harmony, though modal, is really a Vaughan Williams invention (with a little help from Debussy). Long before Stravinsky's neoclassic essays, Vaughan Williams reaches out over the centuries to shake hands with the Tudor composer Tallis.

Unlike Stravinsky, however, who creates artistic tension between two eras by keeping past procedures and present distinct, Vaughan Williams, like many good Romantics, essentially incorporates the past to reinvigorate the present. The Musical Material The Fantasia uses two main themes: The Tallis hymn: A "swaying" subject (Michael Kennedy's phrase), first heard at 0:37. This generates many of the subsidiary themes in the work. The swaying subject initially doesn't sound all that promising. Essentially, it centers around one note. But Vaughan Williams finds remarkable uses for it. The subject functions in several ways: 1. As a response to the "call" of another theme 2. As a transition from one theme to another, or as an approach to or departure from a climax 3. As a theme in its own right Vaughan Williams also breaks up the hymn into its constituent phrases, so that we really have a set of subthemes: A1. A rising theme beginning with an identifying minor-third interval, first heard plucked by the lower strings at the beginning of the work (0:27) A2.

An answering phrase in the same rhythm as A1, first heard at 0:48, again plucked in the lower strings A3. A dotted rhythm in triple time, on a rising, yearning phrase in Phrygian mode (on the piano, play e-f-g-a-g-f-e), heard in its full form at 1:49. This phrase apparently meant a great deal to Vaughan Williams. It stays with him throughout his career and culminates in his opera The Pilgrim's Progress, in the entrance into the Celestial City, where it is set to glorious alleluias. A4. Yet another dotted rhythm in triple time (2:07), which moves like a galliard and usually is reserved for climaxes and backing off to quieter levels. It generally moves down in pitch. We'll see how this plays out. Introduction The Fantasia begins with a series of descending 'magic chords' (the melodic outline resembles that of Vaughan Williams' song, "Bright is the ring of words," from Songs of Travel) (0:00). At the time, Vaughan Williams was interested in unusual chord changes. You find the same thing introducing the slow movements to the Symphony No.

1 ("Sea") and Symphony No.2 ("A London Symphony"). In the low strings, we hear an adumbration of A1 plucked out softly (0:27). This is answered by the sway (0:37) under a held note from the high strings. The low strings now pluck out A2 (0:48). The sway rises to a shortened A3 (1:05), which abruptly cuts both itself and the introductory section off. Statement (1:15) The Tallis themes sound in their full forms: A1, sway, A2, sway, A3, and A4. All strings play in the first statement, with the second violins, violas, and first celli handling the melody in unison, for an incredibly rich string sound. Rising arpeggios from low to high in the upper strings (2:26) lead to a restatement of the theme (2:31) in the first violins and first violas (you shouldn't forget the theme). There's much octave double-stopping (each string player sounds two notes at once), a higher dynamic, and - guess what? – an appassionato marking after all!

This reaches a climax, which dies in more magic chords, caught from the tail of A4. First Episode A2 and A3 explored. A declamatory, abrupt statement of A2 (3:57) alternates with the sway (4:09). At 4:56, A3 alternates with the sway. We then return to the introductory "magic chords" (5:07) in the smaller orchestra II, alternating with the sway in orchestra I. The sway reaches a small peak in both choirs, then dims as it alternates between orchestra I and orchestra II. Second Episode A3 explored. The solo viola leads off with a variant on A3 (6:10). This merges with the sway and an abrupt statement of A3, which the string quartet takes up (6:55). The sway begins again in the small choir and larger one joins in with another declaiming of A3. The string quartet continues its polyphonic meditation on the subtheme (8:11), and the full orchestra again declaims A3 (8:31) before it falls and dissolves into the sway of the string quartet (8:46).

Third Episode Explores the swaying subject. The small choir extends the quartet's sway and takes off down new melodic bypaths, with annotations provided by the quartet (8:55). At 9:15, large and small orchestras embark on "the chant of pleasant exploration," to borrow Whitman, and begin to build (9:57) to a huge climax, culminating in A3 (11:12). This dies down to an "afterglow" in the small choir (12:00). Fourth Episode For me, this is the "deep heart's core" of the entire piece - a miracle of the imagination. The sway tries to start again, but doesn't seem to be able to get beyond two notes (12:15). It begins with a huge push and dissolves into fragments of "magic chords." This leads to Restatement (13:05) The lower strings begin to pluck out Tallis's hymn once more (A1). The orchestra provides a featherbed of sound, and the solo violin and viola duet on A2, A3, and more sway.

Everybody joins in on A4 (14:08), which loses heat and leads to more "magic chords" at 14:34. Coda At 14:50, the strings carry the sway to the end, with a short benediction. Afterword I've known this work for almost forty years. I treasure it. I'm quite aware that understanding the skeleton says very little about the miracle of its life. If I knew how that were done, I wouldn't be writing prose. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Eugene Ormandy & Philadelphia Orchestra) - YouTube Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Eugene Ormandy & Philadelphia Orchestra) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Uploaded on Jan 26, 2011 Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Tallis Fantasia)" as performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy For more popular performances of the Tallis Fantasia: Category Ralph Vaughan Williams — Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis — Listen, watch, download and discover music for free at Last.fm klassik Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a piece of orchestral music by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was composed in 1910 for the Three Choirs Festival, and was one of the first major successes for Vaughan Williams. He revised the work twice, in 1913 and 1919. The work is scored for an expanded string orchestra divided into three parts: orchestra I, a full-sized string orchestra; orchestra II, a single desk… read more Don't want to see ads?

Subscribe now Similar Tracks How Vaughan Williams captured a country with strings - Telegraph How Vaughan Williams captured a country with strings The Fantasia is far more than simply the reworking of a hymn tune, says Simon Heffer Vaughan Williams's music has hidden depths that belie his 'pastoral' reputation Photo: PA Comments In 1906, a clergyman called the Rev Percy Dearmer – his name will be familiar to many of you who have, in moments of boredom in church, read the small print of your hymn book – turned up at the Chelsea house of Ralph Vaughan Williams. “I had heard of him as a parson who invited tramps to sleep in his drawing room,” the composer recalled many years later, “and I feared he was going to ask me to do the same”. In fact, Dearmer had come to ask Vaughan Williams, then in his mid-thirties and still starting out as a composer, to help him with the musical side of The English Hymnal, a book that was to become the staple of Anglican congregations throughout the country, and is still used by some today.

The composer did write quite a few of his own tunes, which are among the best in the book – such as for the hymns “For all the saints” and “Come down, O love divine”. However, he also pillaged many others from the stable of English folk song, such as a tune from Sussex that became “O little town of Bethlehem”. Nor did he hesitate to borrow from the Renaissance masters of English music, which is where he found a tune that would have an even further-reaching resonance in his work, and in classical music. He found the Third Psalter Tune of Thomas Tallis, written in 1567, and used it for hymn number 92 in the Hymnal, “When, rising from the bed of death”. But he sensed, having done that, that he had unfinished business with the tune, and embarked on an exploration of Tudor music and its sonorities that culminated in the composition of one of his most famous and beautiful works, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Tallis was one of the world’s leading composers of sacred choral music of his era; the challenge Vaughan Williams set himself was to translate the sounds of choral music into a string orchestra.

Since the early years of the 20th century, Vaughan Williams had been collecting English folk-tunes, of the sort that were to prove of such use to him in writing the music for so many hymns. He was formulating an idea of “national music” that was to inform much of his own writing, and whose nature and ethos he would express in a famous essay of that name in the 1930s. Resurrecting a beautiful tune from a much earlier era of English music also fitted in with the composer’s ideology about his craft: it enabled him to link his own creativity with that of a composer from 350 years earlier, in what would seem an unbroken strand of musical, and cultural, continuity. In 1908, between discovering the Tallis tune and writing the Fantasia, Vaughan Williams went to Paris to study with Ravel, the greatest orchestrator of his era. He made his English pupil think more carefully about the sounds an ensemble of instruments would make, and also about how to make certain sounds using an orchestra.

Ravel’s own gift, obvious to anyone who listens to any of his orchestral music for even a few minutes, is how much of an effect he makes with relatively small forces. Before his lessons – which he called his “French polish” – Vaughan Williams’s orchestral works had a thickness of texture that seemed a little primitive. He would never entirely throw off that aspect of his writing – it is something that handicaps him in some of his later works – but he did return from Paris with a new lightness of touch, and an improved thoughtfulness about his composition. The former quality is plainly visible in his Wasps overture of 1909; the latter in the technical skill that went into turning Tallis’s tune and Vaughan Williams’s development of it into a work for string orchestra. Fundamental to the effect of this work is that the composer splits the string orchestra into three parts of three different sizes. There is a large orchestra; there is a smaller one of nine players; and there is a string quartet. It is this structure, rather than any obvious compositional effects that might be considered the clichés of writing for strings, that provides the contrasts within the work.

The second orchestra is used almost as an echo of the first, providing in some respects what certain critics have called a “halo” of sound. The appeal of the work rests not simply on its beauty, but on the ghostly, mystical sound effects that constitute that sense of beauty in the writing. The work was first performed in Gloucester Cathedral at the Three Choirs Festival 100 years ago. A special centenary performance takes place there on Tuesday. The audience at the premiere included the young Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, both of whom were overcome by what they heard. Howells especially was impregnated with an influence that shaped much of his own writing over the following 70 years. Vaughan Williams obtained his effects then – as many other performers of the work have since – by having the three groups of strings apart from each other in the cathedral, reinforcing the effect of an echo. It is certainly a work one hears best in a large church or cathedral, not so much for any religious undertones (which, given that the work was written by an agnostic, must be imagined rather than real) as for the effect of the acoustics of such buildings, with their high vaulted ceilings, on the music.

The work has been recorded many times, but there is one account of it so far superior to all others that one has little need to listen to anything apart from it. It was made by John Barbirolli with the Sinfonia of London in 1962 for EMI, and is still available. The Fantasia was recorded in the Temple church in London, to capture the right sort of acoustic, and in the middle of the night, to ensure that extraneous noise was at a minimum. Sometimes, the strings sound almost like an organ, but then reveal themselves again for what they are. It is a recording in which not just all the beauty of the work, but all its tensions – it is far more than simply the reworking of a hymn-tune – are given their utmost expression. There is what Michael Kennedy, Vaughan Williams’s friend and biographer, has called a “grave beauty” about the work: it is those depths of feeling, and of Englishness, that bring people back to it again and again. As with its near-contemporary The Lark Ascending, it is a work that has pigeonholed its composer in the English pastoral school.

We know he was far more than that; indeed, the depths in his own creativity are evident in this work as in none that he had written before it. Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis on CD, SACD, DVD, Blu-ray & download (MP3 & FLAC) - Buy online from Presto Classical Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis LSO String Ensemble, Roman Simovic The LSO counts the finest orchestral players among its members and many of its principals are renowned soloists in their own right. They have developed new ensembles within the Orchestra to hone their incredible musicianship in different ways: from recent recordings of Reich by the LSO Percussion Ensemble to unique chamber performances of Stravinsky's 'The Soldier’s Tale' and Mozart's 'Gran Partita'. The LSO String Ensemble, directed by Orchestra Leader Roman Simovic, are a key example of this practice, showcasing the wealth of talent that the London Symphony Orchestra has to offer.

Following two well-received releases, the LSO String Ensemble continues on LSO Live with three English masterpieces: Vaughan Williams' 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis', a visionary fusion of folksong and sacred music; Britten's 'Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge', a challenging landmark of 20th-century string writing, here in a virtuosic performance; and Elgar's 'Introduction and Allegro', a work beloved of the LSO, having been composed for and premiered by the Orchestra. "Delightfully sweet-toned lyricism, and an easy, smiling virtuosity". The Daily Telegraph on Roman Simovic. An acclaimed soloist, performing at many of the world’s most prestigious venues, Roman Simovic has awarded prizes at numerous international competitions, placing him among the foremost violinists of his generation. He says of these pieces: "it’s a big challenge for me to perform this wonderful English programme with an English orchestra. The LSO has a really special, unique, sound and to produce this standing up without a conductor, well it’s quite a challenge!

But my fellow players are all fantastic musicians with huge knowledge and I think people more and more are looking forward to our concerts, because it’s something really special: real chamber music." Format: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Pinchas Zukerman returns to The Lark Ascending for the first time on record in over 40 years in a magical performance with the orchestra of which he is Principal Guest Conductor: the Royal Philharmonic, founded 70 years ago by Sir Thomas Beecham. Zukerman plays and conducts a collection of the best in English music: Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia and Elgar’s Introduction & Allegro and Serenade for Strings frame shorter works such as Salut d’amour, Chanson de Matin and Chanson de Nuit. The recording also includes the world premiere recording of In Moonlight: an arrangement for solo viola, strings and harp of Elgar’s famous Canto Popolare.

“Zukerman's violin playing has lost nothing of its masterful immensity, gorgeousness of tone, and likeable directness of manner over the years, and to hear those qualities at work in The Lark Ascending is a memorable experience…there's no trace of portentousness in Zukerman's approach to the vast musical spaces searched out by the Tallis Fantasia; yet this seemingly no-nonsense interpretation has a strongly characterised, tight-reined majesty” BBC Music Magazine, May 2016 **** “Readers who see [The Lark Ascending] in terms of sunlit rapture rather than otherworldly transcendence will be well satisfied, not least because Zukerman's fabulous timbre remains a marvel…there's welcome warmth and naturalness in the music-making of a partnership previously undocumented on disc.

The selection is generous too, with an interlude of old-school favourites” Gramophone Magazine, April 2016 “It’s 40 years since he tackled VW’s The Lark Ascending, and if the bird sounds a bit wiry today, Zukerman still phrases the music with affection.” Sunday Times, 6th March 2016 Household Music David Briggs (organ) This double CD includes the complete original organ works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, of which two are unpublished and three are world première recordings. There are also many organ transcriptions, some by friends and contemporaries of Vaughan Williams, others newly commissioned for this production, including David Briggs’ transcription of the Overture to The Wasps and Peter Beardsley’s transcription of The Tallis Fantasia. As a bonus, we include the first recording of Henry Ley’s Fantasia on Aberystwyth. One of the foremost concert organists (and composers) of his generation, David Briggs enjoys a busy touring schedule that takes him all over the world. On this release he plays the restored 1912 Walker organ of Sacred Heart Church, Wimbledon, a sumptuous English organ with three 32 foot stops.

Hallé , Sir Mark Elder Following highly acclaimed previous Vaughan Williams releases, Hallé announces a new volume of British orchestral jewels including his Pastoral Symphony which movingly depicts the horrors of the First World War. Two of Vaughan Williams’ most popular works, Wasps Overture and Tallis Fantasia, are coupled with arguably his greatest and most original Symphony and a delightful multiple setting of a folk-song which enchanted the composer throughout his life. Hallé’s recording of Symphonies No 5 & 8 (CDHLL7533) was awarded Sunday Times Album of the Week and Music Web Recording of the Month (April 2013) The Wasps Overture has become one of the composer’s most popular works. From the opening orchestral buzzing of a swarm of wasps, it emerges as one of English music’s great tunes, this work is a showcase for the vivid orchestral colours of Vaughan Williams’ writing, presented here to the height of effect by the acclaimed musicians of the Hallé. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is one of Vaughan Williams’s most frequently played works and is acknowledged as one of the greatest examples of writing for strings.

Although the treatment of Tallis’s theme is mainly contemplative, there are dramatic and passionate moments in the Fantasia, which is scored for two string orchestras (the second orchestra comprising only nine players) with solo quartet. The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony is characterized with a mood which is gently elegiac and dark, and which reflects the work’s true genesis. Although the title mistakenly led audiences and critics to associate the work entirely with rural landscapes and English folksong, it is in fact directly related to the First World War of 1914‑18. Vaughan Williams, although forty‑one when war was declared, enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served as a wagon orderly in France. Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’, for strings and harps was written for the New York World Fair in 1939, when Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance in Carnegie Hall.

Vaughan Williams first encountered the folksong Dives and Lazarus in 1893, when he was 21, later collecting several versions, and in this mature work he displays his affection for the melody in variants which are not exact replicas but reminiscences of various versions in several folksong collections, including his own.

“The troubled, sullied world that the music explores is recreated by Elder and the Hallé without ever becoming overwrought or maudlin, and bringing out unexpected resonances along the way.” The Guardian, 5th November 2014 **** “Elder and the Hallé Orchestra play the symphony from the heart and the music soars...A glowing performance of the much-loved “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” also raises the spirits.” Financial Times, 29th November 2014 **** “Performances that rival even the classic Boult recordings...Elder’s interpretation vividly highlights the troubled undercurrents of the Pastoral Symphony.” MusicWeb International, January 2015 “Elder and his inspirational Mancunians continue their own-label RVW cycle with a rapt account of the third symphony, its sombre reflection of a world torn apart by war here winning in its eloquent simplicity.” Classical Music **** “[the Tallis Fantasia] is tight-reined, yet also singing and surging with no trace of anti-Romantic tendentiousness...But what makes this release so special is Elder and the Hallé's interpretation of the Pastoral Symphony...Elder's

 telling way with the music's pacing...articulates the whole design with a vividness that allows an element of genuine dramatic sweep to come through.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2015 ***** “the finest volume yet in Sir Mark Elder's unfolding Vaughan Williams cycle...Abetted by uncommonly articulate orchestral playing, the performance of the Pastoral Symphony evinces a glowing dedication, remarkable luminosity of texture, songful rapture and emotional clout that mark it out as a front-runner...A marvellous disc.” Gramophone Magazine, February 2015 “It is still a revelation to find how much Sir Mark Elder draws from well-loved and oft-performed scores…[the Pastoral Symphony is a] wonderfully perceptive performance.” International Record Review, March 2015 London Philharmonic Orchestra , Sir Adrian Boult Now rightfully acknowledged as a towering figure, Vaughan Williams was the first composer to write in the English language, using folksong in the Norfolk Rhapsody, a Tudor hymn in the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and absorbing and transforming his influences in the stunningly beautiful Serenade to Music.

During the 16th and 17th centuries England had been a leading participant in the delevopment of European music, but after the early death of Purcell in 1695, music in England came to be dominated by musicians of foreign origin: notably Handel and Mendelssohn. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is the best-known of a new generation of composers that came after Elgar and made up what became known as the English Musical Renaissance. Along with Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams travelled the country collecting and preserving English folksong traditions, and was largely responsible for the revival of interest in folksong. So strong was his interest in the subject that, like Holst, folksong was absorbed into his compositional style and was to influence his concert music, giving it a uniquely English quality. Starting with the evocative Thomas Tallis Fantasia, (RVW's look back at his great 16th-century predecessor) this set contains some of the composer's best-known and most-loved music, including the popular Fantasia on Greensleeves and the beautiful Lark Ascending. Up to 40% off Warner Classics Symphony No.

2 ‘London’ : I. Lento - Allegro risoluto - Molto pesante (extract) Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (extract) Symphony No. 1 ‘A Sea Symphony’ II. On the Beach at Night, alone Artists include: Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra , Kees Bakels , New Zealand SO, James Judd , David Greed, English Northern Philharmonia , David Lloyd-Jones , Roderick Williams , Iain Burnside , Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and many more One of the leading English composers of his generation, Vaughan Williams went some way towards creating a specifically English musical idiom, influenced by his interest in folk-song yet underpinned by a personal vision and language. This is nowhere better expressed than in his superb cycle of Nine Symphonies. The ‘London’ Symphony features a rich medley of thematic material that suggests the varied life of the capital city. The Lark Ascending, which concludes this disc, is one of Vaughan Williams’s most enduringly popular compositions. Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis - YouTube Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video?

Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Dec 14, 2013 This beautiful theme, written by Thomas Tallis, was arranged for double string orchestra and string quartet by Ralph Vaughan Williams. It has been transcribed for band by Ron Poorman who conducts the South Jersey Area Wind Ensemble in its first performance. Category Cloud of knowing – Tallis Fantasia | Culture | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close A century ago, on the evening of 6 September 1910, a 2,000-strong audience at the Three Choirs festival crammed into the pews of Gloucester cathedral to hear Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, one of the most popular contemporary English works since its 1900 premiere. But between them and their devotion stood the unfamiliar figure of Ralph Vaughan Williams, aged 37, nervously preparing to conduct the world premiere of his just-completed work, the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

"A queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea," the cathedral's organist had called it, but despite remaining unrecorded until 1936, the Tallis Fantasia has come to join the crowning glories of English orchestral music. Its innate gravitas has not diminished its popular appeal. Classic postwar recordings by John Barbirolli, Adrian Boult and Richard Hickox have become CD bestsellers. It was a regular fixture in the upper reaches of the BBC's Hundred Best Tunes, and for the last two years Classic FM listeners have voted it number three in the station's Hall of Fame poll (number one is a later Vaughan Williams piece, The Lark Ascending). At this year's Three Choirs festival in August, Roger Norrington will reprise the work with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the gothic vaults where it was first performed. That historic 1910 concert, with its double bill of fresh-minted masterpieces, also marked a fork in the road. Today, Elgar and Vaughan Williams are commonly considered part of the same patriotic British pomp'n'pastoral breed, but the reality is more complicated.

Elgar's Gerontius is a lengthy work suffused with the composer's Catholic faith, describing the itinerary of a soul towards final judgment. Vaughan Williams, on the other hand, was a humanist, agnostic radical. Lasting 19 minutes, the Fantasia contained no obvious theological overtones, yet its abstract unpickings of a tune by an almost forgotten Elizabethan composer seemed designed to resonate within the cathedral arches. Most critics found it indigestible. "It is a grave work," wrote the Musical Times's anonymous correspondent, "exhibiting power and much charm of the contemplative kind, but it appears overlong for the subject-matter." It was a festival custom not to applaud in church at the end of works, so Vaughan Williams would have left the podium to solemn silence. But not everyone, 100 years ago, was unmoved. Sitting rapt in the audience were Herbert Howells and Ivor Gurney, two of the cathedral's young organ scholars, later to become celebrated composers.

"For a music-bewildered youth of 17," Howells recalled 71 years later, "it was an overwhelming evening, so disturbing and moving that I even asked RVW for his autograph – and got it!" Important allegiances were struck that night, and Howells and Gurney spent the night walking the streets of Gloucester, sleepless and fired up with excitement. And a reviewer for the Times, a month later, admired the piece's complex weave of folksong, hymnal and mystic atmosphere: "One is living in two centuries at once . . . It cannot be assigned to a time or school but it is full of the visions which have haunted the seers of all times." The Fantasia emerged in an age of musical antiquarianism in which long-forgotten treasures of English music, mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, were being exhumed. In 1910 the manuscript of Purcell's music drama The Fairy-Queen was discovered, and immediately staged at Morley College by Gustav Holst, with Vaughan Williams supplying linking passages.

Spurred on by the musical philanthropist Walter Willson Cobbett's annual competition to write a chamber piece inspired by the Renaissance "phantasy", composers of Vaughan Williams's generation – Holst, Butterworth, Howells, Bridge, Ireland – were unearthing a sonic line that stretched from the Tudors – Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Taverner, Dowland – by way of the Restoration music of Purcell and William Lawes. They skirted around the Teutonic-Romantic preoccupations of their teachers and elders Parry, Stanford and Elgar, and kept their distance from the blighted despair of the Celtic twilight movement. This was also a generation that came of age at a time of literary time travel. William Morris's 1890 novel News from Nowhere was set 200 years in the future, in an England transmuted to a medieval earthly paradise in which commerce, industry and government had been replaced by a system of exchange and barter between crafts-loving freemen. Richard Jefferies's After London, or Wild England (1885) portrayed the metropolis reclaimed as a wilderness after an unspecified natural disaster.

HG Wells's The Time Machine (1895) pits the Eloi's edenic lifestyle against the Morlocks' industrial underworld. Along with Wells, Vaughan Williams and Holst had attended meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Society at Morris's home, which put them in touch with a Fabianite circle that included George Bernard Shaw and George Trevelyan. English music, in the first decades of the 20th century, is saturated with the sense of drawing on the past in order to prepare for a new, improved future. The subtext of later Vaughan Williams compositions such as Sancta Civitas (1925) and the opera The Pilgrim's Progress (completed in 1951 after a lifetime's tinkering) is the ethical-spiritual journey to a kingdom without a king, to the heavenly city run by a people's mandate. The composer was, to borrow Billy Bragg's phrase, a "progressive patriot" who advocated a harmonious concord of nations while remaining proud of his own distinct culture.

Noting how the English could sometimes laugh at their own characteristics, Vaughan Williams wrote: "Out of such characteristics, these hard knots in our timber, we can help to build up a united Europe and a world federation." Workable internationalism could only be achieved after coming to terms with one's own roots, not by tearing them up. The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is time travel enacted in music, a temporal bridge between the Tudors and the modern Edwardians. It operates in space as well as time. Vaughan Williams divided the string section into two blocs which throw call-and-response repetitions at each other as if from either side of the choir stalls. A quartet occasionally rises up, but in the opening bars all are united, drawing a veil of mystic chords around the listener. Tallis's lines are furtively picked out in the lower register, and then all strings rhapsodically "sing" the tune in one of the composer's most lustrous, luminescent pieces of writing. Recurring throughout is an ascending phrase in the Phrygian mode – a scale Vaughan Williams detected repeatedly in English folk music.

This motif, sounding like an ecstatic awakening, obsessed him: he used it in The Pilgrim's Progress to denote the Christian pilgrim arriving at his goal, the Celestial City. It recurs as a portal ushering the listener through each of the Fantasia's brief, concentrated segments, all the way to the final unison chord which, if struck correctly, conjures the illusion of a church organ. The Fantasia contains many of Vaughan Williams's trademarks, particularly the way he whets his chord harmonics with the flattened seventh, a staple of English folk, and the minor third, the key feature of Tallis's setting. The piece also makes use of "Picardy thirds", an emotive trick common in Renaissance music, whereby a minor key suddenly stabilises into a major, punching home with the force of a revelation. The second sub-orchestra is intentionally weaker than the first, giving its interventions a ghostly pallor. The quartet acts as a pathfinder or pilgrim, picking up the pace when the orchestral pace slackens, to inject soaring themes derived from folksong. The piece is open to a rich range of readings, even fantasies, not least that it enacts and heals the rupture of English Catholicism and Protestantism.

What's clear is how far it had moved beyond Elgar's late-Romantic shadow. It's not rapturous like The Lark Ascending, composed four years later, but a solemn, controlled release. Instead of conventional symphonic development and recapitulation, it's a very cellular song of fluorescing fragments: a concentrated "cloud of knowing" – the product of a mind in visionary mode. Despite Vaughan Williams's agnosticism, his style flourished when composing on religious themes, or writing church music, as he did with the revised English Hymnal of 1906, over-writing the workmanlike melodies of his Victorian predecessors with a tapestry of tunes culled from folksong, church anthems and his own self-composed homages (such as "For All the Saints", still popular today). There are further parallels here with Tallis, a Catholic given a stay of execution among Elizabeth I's clergy in order to participate in the restructuring of the Anglican church.

The psalm that Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on is short: a four-line verse which appears in Archbishop Matthew Parker's The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre (1567), published nine years after Elizabeth's coronation: Why fumeth in fight the Gentile's spite, in fury raging stout? Why taketh in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about? The Kings arise, the Lords devise, in counsels met thereto, Against the Lord with false accord, against His Christ they go. Tallis's words hover, unvoiced, in the distant background to the Fantasia. He and fellow Catholics in the Elizabethan era were tasked with making church music accessible to untrained congregations while preserving a sense of spiritual wonder. This they achieved by extrapolating from the modes familiar from popular song and balladry, just as Vaughan Williams did with his English Hymnal. The Fantasia acknowledges and celebrates this composerly kinship across three and a half centuries. For Vaughan Williams, the Tudor music school went "straight to the fountainhead for its inspiration, . . . inheriting its energy and vitality from the unwritten and unrecorded art of the countryside".

By this he meant the vast resources of the English folk tradition, maintained as an unofficial oral tradition among the nation's countryfolk. The first decade of the 20th century marked the professionalisation of the folk-collector, previously a hobbyist's domain. Cecil Sharp's influential English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions was published in 1907, and Vaughan Williams was an active member of the Folk-Song Society. (In 1911 he organised a petition – signed by such luminaries as Thomas Hardy, JG Frazer, Elgar and Sabine Baring-Gould – to have Sharp placed on the civil list.) Vaughan Williams had been bicycling round the lanes and pubs of Wiltshire, Somerset and Norfolk since 1903, jotting down farm labourers' wonky balladeering, and these found tunes leaked into the music he was writing throughout the decade: In the Fen Country, the Norfolk Rhapsodies, The Wasps and On Wenlock Edge. The Fantasia heralded the making of his career as well as a new clarity in his art.

His A Sea Symphony premiered two months later in Leeds, and he was soon well on the way to composing his second, the London, as well as embarking on his first opera, Hugh the Drover, and the Five Mystical Songs. Folk music, hymn tunes, visionary literature, Renaissance polyphony and cutting-edge orchestration fused in a potent summoning of the humanist New Jerusalem. The night after the Fantasia's premiere in 1910, Parry gave a speech declaring music to be a socially inclusive agent "to get the people from the slums to be elevated by [its] power". In that month's Musical Times, a contributor had commented: "It is our idiosyncrasy as a nation to prefer religious sentiment to patriotic and national feeling." For Vaughan Williams, the two were inextricably entwined, and the Tallis Fantasia is the most perfect expression of that unity. "I feel," the composer wrote shortly afterwards, "that I am perhaps beginning to emerge from the fogs at last." The Philharmonia Orchestra will play Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis at Meltdown, the Southbank Centre, tomorrow.

Box office: 0844 875 0073. Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis - Williams | HD Classical Music Wedding March from "A Midsummer Ni... by Mendelssohn Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a work for string orchestra by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was composed in 1910 and performed for the first time in September of that year atGloucester Cathedral for the Three Choirs Festival. Vaughan Williams himself conducted, and the composition proved to be a major success. He revised the work twice, in 1913 and 1919. Performances generally run between 14 and 16 minutes. The work takes its name from the original composer of the melody, Thomas Tallis (c.1505--1585). Many of Vaughan Williams' works are associated with or inspired by the music of the English Renaissance. In 1906 Vaughan Williams included Tallis's Third Mode Melody in the English Hymnal, which he was then editing, as the melody for Joseph Addison's hymn When Rising from the Bed of Death.

The tune is in Double Common Meter (D.C.M. or C.M.D.). Composition The work is scored for an expanded string orchestra divided into three parts: orchestra I, a full-sized string orchestra; orchestra II, a single desk from each section (ideally placed apart from Orchestra I); and a string quartet. Vaughan Williams made this configuration resemble an organ in sound, with the quartet representing the swell division, orchestra II the choir division, and orchestra I the great division. The score specifies that the second orchestra should be placed apart from the first. This spacing emphasises the way that the second orchestra several times echoes the first orchestra. In structure this piece resembles the Elizabethan-age "fantasy." The theme is heard in its entirety three times during the course of the work, but the music grows from the theme's constituent motives or fragments, with variations upon them. A secondary melody, based on the original, is first heard on the solo viola about a third of the way into the Fantasia, and this theme forms the climax of the work about five minutes before the end.

The original 1567 theme Tallis's original tune is in the Phrygian mode and was one of nine he contributed to the Psalter of 1567 for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. When Vaughan Williams edited the English Hymnal of 1906, he also included this melody (number 92). Tallis's original words to the hymn were: "Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout? Why tak'th in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about? The Kings arise, the Lords devise, in counsels met thereto, against the Lord with false accord, against His Christ they go. —Psalm 2:1--2, Archbishop Parker's Psalter (1567)" In popular culture In 1997 it was the theme music to the concluding sketch of the last episode of series 3 of The Fast Show featuring recurring characters Ted and Ralph at the former's wife's grave. In 2010 listeners of the UK classical music radio station Classic FM voted the piece into third place on the station's "Hall of Fame", an annual poll of the most popular classical music works.

This work has featured in a number of films. It was played in the 1988 film Remando al viento (Rowing with the Wind) starring Hugh Grant as Lord Byron, was prominently featured in the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World with Russell Crowe, The Thief and the Cobbler (Recobbled Cut) and was referenced in the post-crucifixion music of John Debney's score to the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. This piece was also featured in the novel Fifty Shades Darker by E. L. James and was chosen by the author for the classical-music soundtrack for a planned film version of the series. In August 2013, the piece was used in the final episode of the twentieth series of British motoring series Top Gear, in a segment celebrating the British motor industry. ----------------------------------------------------- The text above is offered by courtesy of Wikipedia, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Classical music piece performed by: Gardner Chamber Orchestra; Douglas Boyd Licensed by: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Music license: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Website:

Question: Who composed, in 1909, "A Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis"?
Answer: (Ralph) VAUGHAN WILLIAMS